A commentary on digital photography news and practice based on my ongoing photo magazine coverage of the industry and photographer community since 1975.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Breaking Out Of The Herd

It has always been my nature to find what works for me regardless of whether most everyone else is doing something different. Since 1975 I have purchased and driven Saab cars almost exclusively, and still drive a Saab. When I was a freelancer in the 60's my colleagues used Nikons and I preferred the Topcon 35mm SLR camera system. And if I were not already very invested in another brand I think I'd probably choose and buy a Sigma digital camera. Not just to be different than the herd, but the technology and thinking Sigma employs I believe has positive image quality performance advantages.

Today Sigma announced their company has purchased Foveon, Inc, the California company that developed the unique 3 layer Foveon X3 sensor technology that has been featured in Sigma's SD14 dSLR digital camera and the recent DP1 compact digital camera.

Along with the announcement of the purchase of Foveon Sigma also released news of these two Sigma models in improved and upgraded models, the DP2 compact, and the SD15 dSLR. The latter will now also offer the convenience advantage of JPEG output using the new TrueII image processing engine from the DP2.

I used and tested the first Sigma dSLR the SD10 when it was released some time back, and was very much impressed with the quality of images it produced. I will look forward I hope to an opportunity to try out the Sigma DP2 next year after it is released, as it would be nice to have a walk-around compact in my pocket that would be capable of producing more than typical snapshot quality and would complement a professional dSLR system camera.

I have found that the people I have known who have been seriously dedicated to photography are inclined to be a bit more individual and independent than most people. That may be a part of photography's appeal because going out and making photo graphs is a rather solitary activity rather than team sport. And that too may be why I have always had an eye for the unusual that stands out from the crowd, which Sigma surely does with their cameras. True some odd-balls should be viewed with some skepticism, but my experience with cars and cameras has taught me sometimes not following the same path as most are traveling leads to good places. It sure has as far as finding little jewels of scenery to photograph on seldom travelled back roads. I think the Sigma compact digital DP2 and dSLR SD15 should be considered too as exceptional standouts and taken very seriously if ultimate photographic image quality is a photographer's goal.